Abstract

This thesis is a bottom‐up corpus stylistic exploration of the text world of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories that focuses on the emergence of semantic prosodies via keywords in context, collocation andn‐grams. The study addresses existing views on semantic prosody and tests the nine‐word window of collocational force (Louw 2000). It uncovers linguistic aspects of Lovecraft’s stories that could not be detected intuitively and provides a firm basis for some subjective literary assumptions. It also demonstrates how Lovecraft primes (Hoey 2007) his readers throughout hiscollection of stories to recognise and replicate the mental representations which surround invented proper nouns through triggering background knowledge intertextually.